


I just want (to make you laugh)

by demigodscum



Series: All Your Troubles [2]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, F/M, Female Tony Stark, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Post-Canon, Sad, nothing here is happy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-29
Updated: 2018-10-29
Packaged: 2019-08-09 10:22:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,609
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16448054
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/demigodscum/pseuds/demigodscum
Summary: Nobody is in a good mood in the mornings.





	I just want (to make you laugh)

**Author's Note:**

> It's been a shit weekend.
> 
> Title (for chapter and series, in fact) from Black Lily by Gazpacho.
> 
>  **Trigger warning:** there's a... joke/mean comment about suicide. It's uncalled for and wrong, but it's there, so.

Three AM in Wakanda is very different from three AM in New York. 

Even with the palace being at the heart of the city, the landscape outside her window is darker than… _almost_ everything she has seen.

Everything except space.

Everything except herself.

Beside her, Rhodey sleeps deeply, the way he has always slept. She watches him in the dim light filtering into the room, marvels at his constancy. Always immutable, always her point of reference. 

Toni’s right hand and Rhodey’s left are clasped together over his chest, and her other one is shoved under his pillow. She never sleeps like this, can never stay still, but that’s exactly why he’d demanded that she do this time. 

_Toni, it’s not gonna disappear_ , he’d said when he had caught her rubbing the arc reactor. It had been a battle to get her to put away the nanobots, but she had conceded when he’d looked at her with the saddest face she’d seen on him since the accident.

So they laid down, curled into each other, and murmured reassurances until Rhodey fell asleep.

She hasn’t closed her eyes even once.

Somewhere down this hallway, Steve sleeps in another room. She knows because she heard him—and Natasha, but Toni is trying desperately to ignore that fact—speaking, heard him open a door, heard him close it. Didn’t hear him anymore after that.

When the sun begins rising over the horizon, she slips out of the bed. Rhodey doesn’t even stir. 

Toni is covered neck to toe in armor again before she even steps out the door.

She passes a few of the guards—male and female, dressed differently, she’ll have to ask about that—but no one stops her, no one says anything. After a few minutes of wandering around, she makes it outside, where the air is crisp and refreshing.

In front of her lie the remnants of the battle she missed. The ground is uneven, large and small craters alike littering the expanse of it; a number of trees have fallen down, their toppled trunks barricading the forest beyond the field; discarded weapons are scattered around, perhaps worth recovering if alien. 

Against her will, her mind starts to imagine what would have happened if they had all fought together, if she and Peter and Strange hadn’t ended up on that ridiculous ship. She imagines that maybe Peter wouldn’t have been so scared, that maybe the black hole that has emerged at the center of her chest wouldn’t have formed, that maybe she would be sleeping right now.

That maybe, if they had been _together_ , they would have won.

“Early morning?”

The helmet comes on in a fraction of a second. Toni pivots around, body thrumming with adrenaline already, and spots him standing beneath the same archway she came through.

“What do you want?” Her voice sounds unfriendly even through the modulator, and she lets herself fall into a matching stand: feet apart, arms tense, chin up.

“To talk. I only want to talk,” Steve says as he steps closer. He does so slowly, cautiously, aware of her animosity, of the threat she poses. 

_Good_ , she thinks.

“I have nothing to say to you.”

Steve snorts. “Really? Because I think it might be the opposite.” He’s right, to some extent. 

She wants to scream, to rage, feels it climbing viciously up her throat. Steve Rogers has always excelled at riling her up, at making her show the worst sides of herself, at shoving her under the harshest possible light.

It’s no wonder he has never liked her.

 _It’s no wonder he lied_.

She stays silent just to prove a point, doesn’t make a single sound, a single move. After a minute, he sighs and lowers his head.

“Fine. I’ll speak then.” Steve stares at the ground for a moment, then raises only his eyes, looks at her from underneath his lashes, and says, “I’m sorry, Toni.”

She wants to hate him, she does. She _really_ does. It would make everything easier, to not have to resist the urge to step close to him, slip her arms around his neck and whisper, _Me too_.

She knows that he is sincerely sorry, but she isn’t sure that it _means_ something. Toni can’t bring herself to believe that it changes anything, that there is a future for them in which they stop snapping at each other—even if it isn’t a future in which they are each other’s first choice.

 _He’s my friend_.

She stays quiet, stays where she is.

With a clear of his throat, Steve continues, “I know… I know things were… bad, the last time we saw each other,” and she wants, _so badly_ , to snark at him for that, to revisit, _aloud_ , exactly how _bad_ things were, “but they’re bad now again. In a larger scale. Worse than we thought they could be.” 

_Bullshit_ , Toni wants to scream. She wants to remind him of her first trip to space, of that mission in Sokovia when they met Wanda and Pietro, of every time that she _tried to tell them_ that something was coming, of _every fucking time_ they marked her off as _paranoid_.

She stays quiet, stays where she is.

“We need you,” Steve murmurs, a slightly forlorn look on his face that she doesn’t know what to do with. “They… they need _us_. We lead better together.” 

That… that steals the breath out of her, and she _hates it_ , hates, with fervor, the sway that he has over her.

She stays quiet, stays where she is, but mostly out of shock.

Steve gazes at her like he’s trying to see through the armor, like he wants to melt it off her. It scares her, sets her nerves on edge, because not too long ago, not nearly as long as she wishes it’d been, he tried to tear it apart.

“I’ve missed you, Toni,” he says, voice the quietest it’s been, and it is yet another blow to her gut, yet another reason she wants to hate him.

She doesn’t though, she _can’t_ , doesn’t have the capacity to not— _not_ hate him. She can stay angry, and she _is_ , it thrums through her radioactively, reverberates against her bones like poison, but she gives in anyway, because she doesn’t have the capacity to resist him all the time.

Steve asks, “Will you please open up the faceplate?” and she does, only because it’s Steve, only because he’s the only one she wants. 

He smiles as if he’s just received a gift.

It doesn’t last.

He smiles, takes a step forward, and immediately, as if synchronized, she takes one back, feels her nostrils flare in warning.

His face falls, slackens in regret, maybe. Disappointment.

They stare impassively at one another, neither breaking the silence for a few long minutes, until he says, “You haven’t slept,” and manages to sound reproachful and confused at the same time, to pull her out of her reverie.

“And you can’t go a day without reproving me, can you?” Toni’s words drip acid, searching for something to burn through.

It’s never Steve. He reacts, gives as much as he takes, but he never gets injured when it’s just them two. Not the way she does.

“It’s always a fight with you, isn’t it? _God_ , look behind you! Can’t you _see_ we’re in the middle of something more important than your resentment?” He isn’t quite shouting, but his voice is louder than it was before. “Even after all these years, after everything that’s happened, are you really that self-centered still?”

Of course. Of course that’s what he thinks, of course he can’t allow her— _anyone_ —to forget that she doesn’t have an ounce of compassion in her, that she only cares about herself.

It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes, she wonders what difference it made that she flew a nuke on her back through a portal out of the Solar System, probably the Milky Way. Sometimes, she wonders why she even bothers at all.

She considers telling him that she hasn’t slept because there is a black hole in the middle of her chest that is sucking the light out of her, because stuck permanently to the back of her lids are Peter and Strange, her mother, Quill, her father, Mantis and Drax, _her mother_.

“Can’t _you_ see that the world doesn’t revolve around Bucky Barnes?” Steve takes a step back, surprise coloring his face. “You destroyed SHIELD for Bucky, you tore the team apart for Bucky, you lied to me for Bucky, you fight now for Bucky,” she laughs bitterly, “Hell, Cap, you tried to kill yourself for Bucky.”

The only one Toni hates, in that moment when Steve’s surprise becomes horrified, saddened, becomes a mirror expression of the way she felt when she saw that video, is herself.

She wants, instantly, _desperately_ , to take it back. There are things impossible to forget, impossible to forgive, and she knows, with absolute certainty, that this is one of them.

She wants to say _I’m sorry_ in the same tone she would use if she were to whisper it against his neck rather than voice it from afar, wants to sit down and confess, like she imagines he does when he visits Church, that she is _so angry_ , that she has kept it—kept _so much_ , more than has to do with him—bottled up for _so long_ , that it spills out at the worst moments, that she doesn’t know how to handle it. That no one has ever made her confront it except him.

This time, Steve walks away. She lets him.

She wants.

Toni always wants. 

**Author's Note:**

> [Tumblr](http://demigodscum.tumblr.com/)


End file.
